Spotted Ratings, Sunday 4/5/15

WHAT MATTERS:

• NBC's twelve-part series A.D. The Bible Continues opened with a perfectly fine but unspectacular 9.5 million viewers and 2.3 demo rating. This was below every point from History's parent series The Bible, which premiered at a 3.3 and dropped to its 2.5 low in week two. Matching those numbers was always going to be difficult, so this definitely isn't a disaster, but personally I would say it's in the bottom half of the range NBC would be content with.

• That audience didn't really take to lead-out drama American Odyssey (1.2), which didn't start off meaningfully better than fellow NBC midseason dramas The Slap (1.1) and Allegiance (1.1). It's probably got to hold roughly 100% of this going forward to have a shot, and that is always unlikely.

• ABC tried to temper the A.D. interest by airing its annual presentation of The Ten Commandments (1.4) on Easter Sunday for the first time in over a decade. It was ahead of the last couple years of Saturday ratings and probably had about the same Plus as the last Sunday airing in 2004 (3.3).

• CBS was in original regular series mode and had nothing unusual to report, other than 60 Minutes (0.9) and Madam Secretary (1.1) giving back the boosts they got from recent basketball lead-ins. Fox was in full repeat mode.

Above based on preliminary adults 18-49 ratings unless otherwise noted. Full table forthcoming!